The Bootlegger's Bride - by Rick Skwiot (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Can vengeance wipe away the dark shadows of the past?

Two corpses--one suicide, the other murder--emerge through the Long Lake ice ten years apart yet linked by a St. Louis bootlegger's killing three decades earlier. Those dramatic events frame twelve-year-old A.J. Nowak's search for identity after being orphaned by World War II and its long shadow. He struggles to overcome dark family history, his explosive anger, his bootlegger and loan shark father's D-Day death, and his widowed mother's desperate self-destruction to safeguard A.J.'s legacy from a blackmailer. Ultimately, A.J. faces a self-defining decision: whether to avenge her death by his own hand.

Review Quotes

"This is a fantastic read about family, love, honor, and treachery that I thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommend." --Grant Leishman, Reader's Favorite

"...Moving and gripping... A memorable love story... A page-turner, with feeling." --Rosalind Brackenbury, Author of Becoming George Sand

"...A vivid sense of place, a deft touch with dialogue, and a gift for creating engaging characters. ...[H]is best book yet." --Michael Mewshaw, Author of Not Heaven But Paradise

"Rick Skwiot's gripping new novel begins...when speakeasies dotted the land...vividly replicat[ing] the life and times." --Terry Baker Mulligan, Author of Sugar Hill: Where The Sun Rose Over Harlem

"Skwiot delivers the grit and beauty of a Midwest gone by, back when life was harder than it is today, but also more honest and...honorable." --Kelly Daniels, Author of A Candle for San Simón

"Packed with mystery, intrigue, psychological twists and turns, and many different kinds of discovery, The Bootlegger's Bride's world is easy to enter and hard to leave." --D. Donovan, Sr. Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

A "compelling family story... engaging." -St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"His most recent and...best novel... The complex plot unfolds and reveals itself in the ways our real memories work, which is rarely sequential... [and] kept me turning the pages to see what happens next." -Konk Life

"...an exciting, suspenseful novel... well-structured with complex, layered characters... Rick Skwiot is a gifted storyteller. I highly recommend this book." -- Nate Mancuso, Historical Novels Review

About the Author

A former newspaper reporter, Rick Skwiot is the author of six previously published works-- four novels and two memoirs-- that have won praise from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and major newspapers. His debut novel Death in Mexico won Florida's Hemingway First Novel Award and his second book, Sleeping With Pancho Villa, was a finalist for the Willa Cather Fiction Prize. His urban mystery Fail was a St. Louis Post-Dispatch notable book for 2014. He's taught postgraduate fiction writing at Washington University in St. Louis and at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he served as Distinguished Visiting Writer.